'Midnight's Children' is still Salman Rushdie's baby

May 3, 2013

Updated Aug. 21, 2013 1:17 p.m.

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Author Salman Rushdie, left, first met filmmaker Deepa Mehta when he sat in as guest host for Charlie Rose on Rose's PBS talk show. Years later they teamed up for the new adaptation of Rushdie's novel "Midnight's Children," for which he wrote the screenplay. 108 MEDIA/PALADIN

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Actor Satya Bhabha as Saleem Sinai and actress Shahana Goswami as his mother Amina in a scene from "Midnight's Children." 108 MEDIA/PALADIN

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Author Salman Rushdie poses for a portrait during the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival in Toronto, where he was promoting the film adaptation of his breakthrough novel, "Midnight's Children," winner of the Booker Prize in 1981 and one of the most highly praised works of fiction of its time. CHRIS YOUNG, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

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Actress Shriya Saran as Parvati and actor Satya Bhabha as Saleem in a scene from "Midnight's Children." 108 MEDIA/PALADIN

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Actress Anshikaa Shrivastava as young Jamila, left, with Darsheel Safary as young Saleem in a scene from "Midnight's Children." 108 MEDIA/PALADIN

Author Salman Rushdie, left, first met filmmaker Deepa Mehta when he sat in as guest host for Charlie Rose on Rose's PBS talk show. Years later they teamed up for the new adaptation of Rushdie's novel "Midnight's Children," for which he wrote the screenplay. 108 MEDIA/PALADIN

There's magic scattered throughout pages of "Midnight's Children," author Salman Rushdie's most-honored novel, so perhaps it's only fitting that a simple twist of fate helped launch its journey from the bookshop to the cinema.

Rushdie and Deepa Mehta already were friends and talking about adapting another of his books, "Shalimar the Clown," when he stopped by her home for dinner while on a book tour in Toronto in 2008.

"We had dinner to talk about sort of nothing and everything, and we were talking initially about that project," Rushdie says during our interview in the garden of the Palm Room at the Four Seasons Los Angeles at Beverly Hills recently. "And then she suddenly just changed tack. Just sort of out of the blue she said, 'Who has the rights to "Midnight's Children"?'

Mehta, whose film "Water" earned a 2007 Oscar nomination for best foreign language film, says in a separate interview that she still doesn't really know why she asked about "Midnight's Children" or why she decided so spontaneously to propose filming it.

"Maybe the best decisions have to be spontaneous," she says. "I think if I had to think about it, it's an iconic book and the adaptation police as I call them will be out in force. But I said if I'm going to do it, and I want to do it, I cannot let the fear paralyze me."

Rushdie says it was essentially a handshake deal that left both he and Mehta wondering what we'd done "and how on earth we were going to make this happen." He says he figured that would mostly be up to Mehta, but she wasn't quite ready to let him take the passive role he expected to play in its creation.

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From the start, Mehta and Rushdie and producer David Hamilton wanted to finance and make the movie independently, outside of the studios that would demand more control over what it ultimately would be. It helped immensely, Rushdie says, that many of the principals agreed to work for little or no upfront money – he, famously, optioned the book for $1.

It perhaps matters more that Rushdie, Mehta and Hamilton all are straight shooters who weren't afraid to say exactly what they thought.

"I think if you're making a film you can't pussyfoot around," he says. "You have to be able to speak clearly and say what you really think because there's too much riding on it. If you can't, if you feel that you have to mollycoddle the other person's emotions or ego, that's terrible. You have to be able to say, 'I think this is crap. Let's chuck that out and try it this way.'"

In the immediate aftermath of their dinner in Toronto, Rushdie says he assumed Mehta would write the screenplay as she had for most of her other films.

"I said to her, 'You do it. You don't need me,' " he says. "It's like Woody Allen asking somebody else to write his screenplay – why would you do that?"

And initially, she says she agreed.

"But the more I thought about him doing it, the more I thought about a novel of this sprawling size," Mehta says of the cuts and changes necessary to turn an epic tale of more than 500 pages into a filmable script. "And because it's an iconic novel I thought that Salman could be ruthless in a way that nobody else could be."

Eventually, Rushdie agreed to write the screenplay, partly because it is the first of his books to be filmed and it seemed like he should be involved, and partly because of his lifelong love of the movies.

"All my life I've been a great movie freak," Rushdie says. "I grew up in a movie town (Bombay). I can remember how exciting it was to go to the movies when you had each week a new movie which now we would count among the masterpieces of cinema. One week there'd be the new Godard and then the new Truffaut and then new Bergman and the new Kurasawa and the new Satayjit Ray.

"There was this little movie theater in Cambridge called the Arts Cinema. I used to go like six times a week. I felt I got as much of my education in that little room as I did in any library.

"So I thought well if that's the case, then here's somebody making a film of your book, and why wouldn't you want to be involved? So I just told myself to stop being an idiot and roll up your sleeves and go to work."

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Like Mehta, Rushdie says he knew the conventional wisdom for film adaptations – the movie isn't as good as the book – was stacked against him. But he can also point to exceptions to that rule, ticking off Ruth Jhabvala's adaptations of E.M. Forster for producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory, director John Huston's version of James Joyce's "The Dead," and director Martin Scorsese's take on Edith Wharton's "The Age of Innocence."

"A film that both Deepa and I admired greatly was (Lucino) Visconti's film of 'The Leopard' – again, classic film from classic novel," Rushdie says. "The reason we thought about that a lot was because we felt that what he had done in that film was something which we needed to do too, which was to combine a sort of epic historical scale with a kind of intimate family story."

Even so, it wasn't easy taking "Midnight's Children," with its richly textured language and first-person narration by Saleem Sinai, a boy born in Bombay at the very moment India gained its independence in 1947, and reshaping it into the conventions of moviemaking. Both Rushdie and Mehta independently felt that ditching the framing narrative – Saleem's storytelling that pilots the novel – was the right thing to do.

"There's a wonderful thing that Michelangelo used to say, where he said that he had this sense of the statue existing inside the stone," Rushdie says. "He said, 'I would take away everything that was not the statue and what would remain was the statue.

"And I came to think of the novel as this enormous slab of marble that we had and somewhere inside that was the movie, and I had to take away everything that was not the movie in order to reveal the movie."

The screenplay and movie that emerged is a much faster-paced version of "Midnight's Children" that still hits the intertwined stories of Saleem, his family and the other magical children born in the first hour that India existed, and that of the country's birth and struggles through its first three decades of independence. It's a human story set on a Cinemascope-worthy political and historical stage.

Shot in Sri Lanka, the film was almost finished when Mehta decided that just a touch too much of the novel had been stripped away.

"I was in the editing room and I thought something was missing," she says. "And I realized what was missing was the language of the book, the language of Salman. The beauty of his language when he says things like, 'In those days all our wars were fought between friends,' or, 'Love is not just born, it is made.'"

So she asked Rushdie to write brief interludes of narration. She auditioned actors for the voice of the older Saleem. And then she decided she had the perfect narrator right in front of her.

"I think I said, 'My God, there is so much of Salman in Saleem, let's try Salman!' " Mehta says. "And he said, 'Absolutely not.' But I said, 'Come on, Salman, be a good sport. At least try it.' "

Rushdie says he was worried he wouldn't live up to the performances of the rest of the cast.

"I was very scared, I have to say, because I thought I don't want to be the weakest link," he says. "She came back and said, 'No, I think it has to be you.' And just twisted my arm 'til I said OK."

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